I love the smell of data in the morning!
Interesting and surprising statistics about digital media and devices. Compiled & curated by Dan Calladine, Aegis Media - dan.calladine@aemedia.com -
All views expressed are my own. Please email me if you have any queries, amendments or suggestions. Follow me on twitter - I'm @dancall

Wednesday, 30 June 2010

"The BBC's hugely popular iPlayer catch-up service costs at least GBP5.2m (USD7.8m) a year to run in operational and development costs, according to the UK broadcaster. The figures, released by the BBC in response to a Freedom of Information request, reveal that GBP 5.7m (USD8.6m) was spent on pre-launch costs for the iPlayer and GBP4m (USD6m) on development costs over the past four years. Running costs for the service total GBP4m (USD6m) annually, meaning the iPlayer has so far cost approximately GBP22.5m (USD34m) since launch.The GBP5.2m (USD7.8m) does not include costs paid to network provider Siemens for handling the 120m streams a month delivered by the player or other fees paid to contractors, such as Microsoft. There are also thought to be some other costs spread across other BBC budgets. However, the sum spent on ongoing development and running costs is still a small fraction of the state-owned broadcaster's total budget, and represents good value for money considering the site attracted approximately 5.9m users each week in February. Estimates suggest that around one-in-six UK citizens watches the iPlayer."Spource: StrategyEye, 29th June 2010

"Almost 30 years after MTV first broadcast that video had killed the radio star, Vevo's music video site launched in December, hoping to revive a format that had been languishing. At 34, Rio Caraeff, a former digital executive at Universal Music, oversees a company owned by Universal, Sony Music and the Abu Dhabi Media Company. He has worked with Google's YouTube site to deliver 50,000 high-definition videos from 8,000 artists on YouTube, on Vevo.com and on sites from AOL to Last.fm. He has secured videos from three large labels, but not Warner Music. Edited highlights of a video interview with FT.com appear below.Six months on from your launch, what scale have you grown to?We have just under 50m unique visitors each month. It's a significant amount of scale that we've built in a very short period of time, largely due to our partnership with Google. We've built the largest music entertainment network online today.How much of that traffic is Google/YouTube responsible for?About 80 per cent of our business comes through the YouTube channel, and about 20 per cent comes off the YouTube channel [from elsewhere]. Our goal is to get to a balanced position fairly soon."Source: Financial Times, 28th June 2010

"UKOM (The UK Online Measurement Company powered by Nielsen) today revealed that people over 50 years old were responsible for the majority of the increase in the numbers of Britons using the Internet over the last year.The size of the UK Internet audience grew by five percent from 36.9 million people in May 2009 to 38.8 million people in May 2010. Of these 1.9 million new Britons using the Internet, 1.0 million (53 percent) were at least 50 years old.Men over 50 were responsible for most of this growth, accounting for 722,000 (38 percent) new British Internet users followed by women over 50 who accounted for 284,000 (15 percent) new users. Following the 50+ age group, women aged 21-34 accounted for 272,000 (14 percent) new British Internet users and ‘tweenage’ girls aged 12-20 who accounted for 231,000 (12 percent)."Source: UKOM/Nielsen, 30th June 2010

Monday, 28 June 2010

"Apple® today announced that it has sold over 1.7 million of its iPhone® 4 through Saturday, June 26, just three days after its launch on June 24. The new iPhone 4 features FaceTime®, which makes video calling as easy as one tap, and Apple’s new Retina display, the highest resolution display ever built into a phone, resulting in stunning text, images and video."Source: Apple press release, 28th June 2010

Friday, 25 June 2010

"Coca-Cola saw “phenomenal” results from its first experiment with paid advertising on Twitter, the drinks company’s digital marketing chief told the Financial Times.
The US soft drinks company is only the second brand to sponsor a “trending topic”, using Twitter’s “promoted tweets” to tap into online discussion about the World Cup this week.
It saw 86m “impressions” or views of the ads in 24 hours, said Carol Kruse, vice-president for global interactive marketing at Coca-Cola, which is an official sponsor of the football tournament.
Coke also saw an “engagement rate” of 6 per cent, compared with the approximately 0.02 per cent of people who click on a regular online advertisement."
Source: Carol Kruse of Coca Cola, reported by the Financial Times, 25th June 2010
Note - 6% x 86m = 5,160,000 engagements

"Using the half a million pages Facebook grader has data on, I found that not only are "interest" pages the most common type, on average they're also the most liked. They're so far above the average in fans that they dwarf every other type. See the chart below? The giant line on the left is interest pages.In the graph I compared the most-liked pages to the average number of fans Facebook pages in our data set have (624). What you see there is those types that have more fans than the average. I had to remove interest pages so you could actually see the rest of the lines."Source: Dan Zarella, writing in the Hubspot blog, 17th June 2010

Thursday, 24 June 2010

"The iPhone currently represents just 4 percent of the EU5 (U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Italy) mobile market, but 18 percent of the overall EU5 smartphone market. However, the iPhone has facilitated fundamental change in mobile user behaviour and ignited fierce competition among device and operating system (OS) providers.iPhone owners are the most voracious consumers of mobile media: 94 percent use mobile media, 87 percent use applications and 85 percent browse the mobile internet. With just 4 percent share of the European market, iPhone users represent 12 percent of all mobile media users."Source: Press release from comScore, 23rd June 2010(More data on operating systems in the full press release)

Wednesday, 23 June 2010

"- 32% of users listen to music on their phone between 1-5 hours a week, with 26% listening to music on their phone 20 hours a week or more.- 65% of Myxer users attended at least one live music event in the past year and 55% of concertgoers bought something from the artist at the venue.- 74% of Myxer users still buy physical CDs, while nearly half of respondents (47%) have reported that radio is the most popular way for them to discover new music."Source: Myxer Boombox report, May 2010, released June 2010Methodology:"Since 2005, Myxer has cataloged demographic, handset, and carrier data for downloads served by our platform. This data set covers over one billion downloads and 35 million unique individuals, and is currently growing by some 90 million downloads each month. The overwhelming majority of Myxer users are in the US.By mining this data, we are able to uncover what we believe to be interesting trends in user behavior and preferences, demographic changes, and carrier and handset usage. Myxer’s BoomBox Report is our way of sharing this information with the industry as a whole.For this month’s report Myxer used PollDaddy, an online polling and survey tool, which gathered responses from 1,049 Myxer users."Note - the report is monthly, free, and well worth signing up for. Sign up here

"Nearly a third (30%) of smartphone users start their day with the mobile Internet and 45% end their day with it, with the peak time for use while relaxing at home in the evening (64%). The only time Web use falls off dramatically is when people are actively engaged in other activities like sports or at live events."This clearly demonstrates how mobile Internet use has caused a significant shift in consumer need to have constant connection with the outside world," stated the report, which based its findings on a survey of 8000 active smartphone users across Italy, Sweden, the U.K., U.S., Australia, China, India and South Korea.What's more, people are accessing the mobile Web at home while consuming other media. Half of smartphone users said they browse the mobile Web while watching TV, listening to the radio, and while traveling. Thirty-nine percent do so while using the PC-based Internet, and 34% while reading newspapers and magazines. From these findings, Initiative concluded that marketers can use mobile to amplify messaging in other media."Source: Initiative Media, reported by Mediapost, 22nd June 2010

Tuesday, 22 June 2010

"Apple® today announced that it sold its three millionth iPad™ yesterday, just 80 days after its introduction in the US. iPad is a revolutionary and magical product that allows users to connect with their apps, content and the Internet in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before.
"People are loving iPad as it becomes a part of their daily lives," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We're working hard to get this magical product into the hands of even more people around the world, including those in nine more countries next month."
Developers have created over 11,000 exciting new apps for iPad that take advantage of its Multi-Touch™ user interface, large screen and high-quality graphics. iPad will run almost all of the more than 225,000 apps on the App Store, including apps already purchased for your iPhone® or iPod touch®."
Source: Apple press release on PR Newswire, 22nd June 2010

Monday, 21 June 2010

"Publisher BBC Wales Interactive says more than half a million people downloaded the first episode of its Doctor Who: The Adventure Games series in the first 12 days after the PC game released for free in the UK.As with the other episodes, the first release, City of the Daleks, was originally intended as a full and legitimate Doctor Who episode for the sci-fi television program, and features the likenesses and voices of the show's stars Matt Smith and Karen Gillen.Doctor Who's head writer and executive producer Steven Moffat, as well as many others involved with the production of the show, is also involved with the publicly-funded game project, as Sumo Digital (Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, Virtua Tennis 2009) handles its development.Along with the 524,299 UK gamers that downloaded City of the Daleks, the publisher notes that the BBC's main Doctor Who site received a week-on-week 67 percent increase in traffic from unique UK visitors during the seven days after the game was released."Source: Gamasutra, 18th June 2010

Friday, 18 June 2010

"TV1's coverage of England's 1-1 World Cup draw with the USA peaked with nearly 20 million viewers on Saturday, 12 June.
ITV1 HD's coverage of the match suffered an embarrassing fault after it cut to an ad break just as Steven Gerrard scored England's goal. There was no interruption to ITV1.
World Cup Live averaged 13.160 million viewers and a 56% share of the audience, between 6.15pm and 9.45pm, according to unofficial overnight figures.
The game itself, which kicked off at 7.30pm, averaged 17.65 million, with a 15-minute peak of 19.415 million – a 69.8% share – between 9pm and 9.15pm."
Source: BARB data, reported by The Guardian, 14th June 2010

"Viewership for the 2010 FIFA World Cup is up significantly on ESPN/ABC and Univision.
Through Sunday, the World Cup is averaging a 2.6 U.S. rating and 4.2 million viewers on ESPN and ABC, up 63% in ratings and 80% in viewership from the comparable point in 2006 (1.6, 2.3 mil).
ABC drew a 2.8 rating and 4.7 million viewers for Sunday's Germany/Australia match, according to Nielsen fast-nationals, up 27% in ratings and 40% in viewership from Mexico/Iran on the first Sunday of the 2006 World Cup (2.2, 3.3 mil).
Also on Sunday, ESPN drew a 2.0 and 3.0 million for Serbia/Ghana.
Not surprisingly, Saturday's USA/England match on ABC stands as the top telecast of the World Cup, with a 7.3 and 13.0 million viewers.
Over on Univision, the World Cup averaged 3.2 million viewers for the first two days, up 49% from 2006.
Saturday's USA/England match drew 4.1 million viewers on Univision, the second-largest audience ever for a USA match on the network. USA/England is not the network's top telecast of this year's World Cup, however; the Mexico/South Africa opener drew 5.4 million viewers."
Source: SportsMediaWatch, 14th June 2010

Source: The Value of a Facebook Fan, Syncapse, June 2010(Chart appears on page 7)Methodology:"The quantitative research for this Syncapse undertaking was conducted in conjunction with Hotspex Market Research and consisted of a 25-minute survey using their online panel. Data was collected from over 4,000 panelists across North America in June 2010.The questionnaire required panelists to self-identify those consumer companies with whom they could be identified as a fan. Then, information on past or projected future consumer behaviors of respondents was collected, together with the feelings of respondents towards the past or projected actions or feelings of others (family, friends, etc.) with respect to their consumer behaviors. Standard Lichert Scale methods were used to profile questionnaire responses.Brands used in this study were twenty of the top brands on Facebook at the time of conductingthis research. In order to ensure that the survey questions were applicable to each product type, research was focused only on consumer brands. Celebrity and un-official pages where not analyzed.Syncapse analyzed the data utilizing SocialTRAC™, a propriety global platform for understanding social media value and business drivers. Assumptions are supported through in-depth proprietary research and data analyses of two-years available data across millions of interactions.Findings were then analyzed contrasting fans and non-fans for these top brands: Nokia, BlackBerry, Motorola, Secret, Gillette, Axe, Dove, Victoria’s Secret, Adidas, Nike, Coca-Cola, Oreo, Skittles, Nutella, Red Bull, Pringles, Playstation, Xbox, Starbucks, and McDonald’s."

"World Cup fever pushed the Internet to a new record on Friday, according to measurements from Akamai.
Traffic to news sites globally started a steady climb about 6 a.m. Eastern time and peaked six hours later at noon, reaching nearly 12.1 million visitors per minute.
The traffic dipped going into the afternoon but stayed well above normal. The figures suggest that the Internet was most active during the Mexico-South Africa game and stayed heavy through the France-Uruguay game.
The day's traffic far exceeded the previous record of 8.5 million visitors per minute, which was set when Barack Obama won the U.S. presidential election in 2008."
Source: Data from Akamai, reported by CNET, 12th June 2010

Thursday, 17 June 2010

Source: OECD based on data from the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), page 16 of The Evolution of News and the Internet, OECD March 2010Note: Many Japanese dailies publish morning and evening editions on the same day under the same title. The above figures count only the morning editionsA slightly updated (June 2010) copy of the report is here

Tuesday, 15 June 2010

"Most of the material the company posts is created by readers, who can Photoshop a funny caption onto an image or remix a popular video in minutes and submit it to one of the Cheezburger sites for consideration. The company says that each day it receives more than 18,000 submissions from readers."Source: The New York Times, 13th June 2010

Monday, 14 June 2010

"Where do Americans begin their online day? According to a study released today by ExactTarget, 58 percent check their e-mail, while 20 percent go first to a search engine or portal site and 11 percent start with Facebook. A conscientious (or worried) 3 percent make their company's site or intranet their first online destination of the day. Five percent go first to a news site and 3 percent go to some other destination.ExactTarget, which specializes in e-mail and digital marketing, conducted the survey in April among members age 15 and older of an online panel."Source: Research by ExactTarget, reported in Adweek, 9th June 2010

Friday, 11 June 2010

"Guardian Media Group’s pre-tax losses increased 77 per cent to £171m in the year to the end of March.Operating loss at Guardian News & Media, the division which publishes The Guardian and The Observer, increased to £37.8m.Detailing its full-year results today, GMG attributed its increased pre-tax losses to an impairment charge against its investment in Emap, totalling £96.5m, and a further impairment of £63.9m on GMG Radio.GMG has also written £47m off its books following the sale of its regional media division to Trinity Mirror.Turnover at GMG fell to £476.2m from £543.4m it made in the same period the previous year, while its combined cash and investment fund stood firm at £260.8m, just down on the previous year where the pot was £267.7m.GNM’s losses were a slight increase on the £33.7m lost the previous year despite cost savings of £26.2m over the period. Revenue at GNM fell by £32.6m in the 12 months to 28 March, while statutory operating losses before exceptional items at GNM were £37.8m, only a slight drop on the previous year's figure of £33.7m."Source: UK Press Gazette, 10th June 2010Earlier - 36.8m lost in 2008-09

"Facebook is increasingly becoming a hub for online video viewing, with more than 20 million videos being uploaded to the social network each month — and more than 2 billion videos being watched. Those two stats, given exclusively to NewTeeVee by a Facebook spokesperson, underscore the growing importance of video as a communications medium on the social networking site.The number of uploads, in particular, has grown pretty substantially over the past year. Last March, Facebook said that it received on average 415,000 video uploads a day, or about 12 million a month, 40 percent of which came directly from webcams. And as more mobile devices that are video-ready enter the market, we can expect the number of mobile videos to increase. Last summer, for instance, Facebook released an update to its iPhone app enabling users to directly upload video to the site."Source: Facebook data reported by NewTeeVee, 8th June 2010

"Twitter’s growth is still accelerating. The service has reached 125 million registered users, up from 105 million almost two months ago.When the company said it had 105,779,710 million registered users on April 14 at its first developer conference, Chirp, in San Francisco, it said it was growing by roughly 300,000 accounts a day. Today, Twitter spokesperson Sean Garrett said the company had 125 million accounts, meaning it’s been growing at an average pace of about 340,000 new registered users a day since Chirp.Twitter’s chief operating officer, Dick Costolo, said two days ago in New York that the company was seeing 190 million unique visitors a month to Twitter.com, up from 180 million visitors in April. But visitors are different from active users, which is what competitor Facebook tracks. Garrett said the company favored measuring visitors partly because it is moving toward an information consumption model, where it’s less important if a person actually tweets or shares content. That’s in line with Twitter’s advertising model, which will show sponsored tweets whether or not a person is a registered user of the site."Source: Data from twitter supplied to VentureBeat, 10th June 2010Earlier - 106m visitors reported on 14th April 2010

Thursday, 10 June 2010

"Not only are many Americans sharing updates about their life (43%), what they are currently doing (36%), and places they are going (31%), many are also revealing brand, product and company preferences. Specifically, about one-quarter are revealing their dissatisfaction with companies, brands or products (26%), talking about companies, brands or products they like (23%) or giving product reviews and recommendations (19%). In fact, one-third (34%) indicate they have used social media as an outlet to rant or rave about a company, brand or product.These are some of the findings of the Harris Poll, conducted online between April 28 and 30, 2010, among 2,131 U.S. adults ages 18 and over.However, it's not just what people are sharing about themselves through social media; it's why they are sharing. Nearly two in five online adults (38%) say they aim to influence others when expressing their preferences online and almost half (46%) feel they can be brutally honest on the Internet.Sharing Brand, Company or Product Recommendations via Social MediaWhile online Americans aged 55 and older are less likely to use social media compared to younger Americans (43% of those 55 and older, versus 78% of 18-34 year olds, 71% of 35-44 year olds and 59% of 45-54 year olds), all age groups who use social media are equally likely to share their dissatisfaction with a company, brand or product via social media (25% of those 18-34 years old, 26% of those 35-44 years old, 25% of those 45-54 years old and 29% of those aged 55 and up).And what people say online about companies, brands and products matters. In fact, nearly half of Americans who use social media say reviews about a particular company, brand or product from friends or people they follow on social networking websites influence them either a great deal or a fair amount (45%) - the same number as Americans who say reviews in newspaper or magazine articles influence them (46%)."Source: Press release from Harris Interactive, 3rd June 2010

Tuesday, 8 June 2010

"China's Ministry of Culture (MoC) today released its 2009 Annual Report on China's Internet Café Market, showing that as of the end of 2009, China was home to 135 mln internet café users nationwide, up 8.43 mln or 6.7% compared to 2008.China's internet cafés receive the bulk of their revenues from hourly usage fees, which have steadily dropped since 1996. Average prices have fallen from an initial RMB 20 per hour to approximately RMB 2 per hour. Total industry value in 2009 was RMB 88.6 bln.There were 138,000 internet cafés nationwide in 2009, up by approximately 8,000 compared to 2008. The market is divided into three tiers based on the number of computers in each café: large-scale cafés (300 computers or more), mid-sized cafés (100-299 computers) and small-scale cafés (fewer than 100). In 2009, large cafés accounted for 7% of the national total, while 46% were mid-sized and 47% were small-scale. There were more than 150 internet café franchise companies in 2009 with over 4,500 locations combined.The number of computer terminals in the nation's internet cafés increased by approximately 1.28 mln in 2009, with the average price per computer of RMB 3,500, contributing nearly RMB 4.5 bln to the industry value of the PC manufacturing sector."Source: 2009 Annual Report on China's Internet Café Market from the Chinese Ministry of Culture (MoC), reported by Marbridge Daily, 8th June 2010

"Last year, Lost achieved the questionable honor of being the second most-pirated TV-show on BitTorrent. With more than 6 million downloads for a single episode, Lost was only trailing Heroes by a few thousand downloads.There is no doubt that the final season of the show will again be a strong contender in 2010’s list. On average, an episode of Lost is downloaded nearly 1.5 million times in the first week after its appearance on BitTorrent, but there is an overwhelming demand for the series finale which aired on Sunday.In the first 20 hours after they appeared on BitTorrent, the final two episodes were downloaded a little over 900,000 times, an amount expected to increase to four or five million by the and of the week. As far as we know, this is a new download record for BitTorrent in such a short time frame."Source: TorrentFreak, 25th May 2010

Friday, 4 June 2010

Source: Research by Nielsen, published in their blog, 1st June 2010Methodology: "To get a better sense of what’s popular and what’s not now, Nielsen recently launched its ‘App Playbook,’ surveying more than 4,200 people who had downloaded an application in the past 30 days"

"Research and consultancy firm, Frank N. Magid Associates, and PlaySpan, the global leader in monetization solutions for online games, virtual worlds, and social networks, today announce their second annual study that evaluates attitudes and behaviors of media and entertainment consumers on virtual goods expenditures.According to the study, 13% of the overall population surveyed reported that they had bought virtual goods in the last 12 months, with the mean of digital good purchase up 14% from $87 in 2009 to $99 in 2010. The median of digital goods purchase is $50 in 2010, a 67% improvement from $30 in 2009. In terms of the heaviest concentration of digital goods buyers, iPhone owners took over the #1 spot, moving from 28% of iPhone owners in 2009 to 43% in 2010. Virtual worlds came in second place with 41% of regular visitors having bought a digital good. Of weekly handheld and mobile gamers, 33% and 32%, respectively, bought digital goods. Overall, more than one-fifth (21%) of those who bought digital goods said they plan to spend more in the next 12 months. Among ways to purchase digital goods, 16% of digital goods buyers say they have used Facebook Credits."Source: Press release from Magid Associates and PlaySpan, 27th May 2010The press release also includes lots of data on the demographics of buyers, and the sorts of places (games etc) where they are buying.

"The downturn took its toll on the European online advertising market last year as growth plummeted to just 4.5%, down from 20% in 2008, fuelled by a fall in digital display revenue in markets such as the UK and France.A report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe has found that the European online ad market was worth €14.7bn (£10bn) last year.The report, compiled by analysts Screen Digest, reflected previous findings in the UK that Google-dominated search advertising remained relatively resilient while marketers pulled budget from online display advertising.Search advertising grew by 10.6% year on year, an impressive performance given the steep declines recorded in other media, but well down on the 26% growth seen in 2008.Display advertising was flat year on year across Europe, but most of the more mature, larger ad markets experienced a decline. The UK was down by close to 5% year on year, France was down 6% and Sweden was down 5%."Source: Data from the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) & PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers), reported by The Guardian, 2nd of June 2010